Short term Virtual Worlds internships are available for students wishing to work with Alan Miller on virtual museums or with Ishbel Duncan, Janie Brooks (ELT) and Paula Miles (Psychology) on the Virtual St Andrews project.
Each project has 60 hours notational funding attached (£50 per 6 hours).
Please contact Alan or Ishbel in the first instance.
Short UG internship: Athena Swan repository
A required project for the SICSA Athena SWAN initiative is to create a repository (website, resource centre, database of statistics) for the SICSA universities ASWAN submissions. The Athena SWAN awards are to do with encouraging more women into the CS area from schools up to senior staff. This work will help CS Schools gather statistics on student numbers and staff numbers as well as good practice events, talks or resources. A notional £500 is associated with the work, 60 hours work.
Please contact Ishbel if you are interested.
PhD Scholarship in Data Science
Potential PhD students with a strong background in Computer Science are encouraged to apply for this three-year studentship funded by the Research Council of the European Commission (ERC). The student will work within an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Computer Science and Geography in the WORKANDHOME project (ERC Starting Grant 2014), which investigates how home-based businesses are shaping society and space.
The student will examine the Computer Science challenges within this research project. The exact scope of the PhD project is open to discussion but we anticipate that the successful candidate will be working broadly on Data Science topics, potentially covering one or more of the following areas: cloud computing, social network analysis and agent-based modelling. This is a unique opportunity to work at the cutting edge of systems research. Come join us in St Andrews.
Funding Notes: The studentship will cover UK/EU tuition fees and an annual tax-free stipend of approximately £13,000. Funding will be for three years of full-time study, starting date ideally in September/October 2015.
Applications: It is expected that applicants should have or expect to obtain a UK first-class honours degree (or its equivalent from non-UK institutions) in Computer Science but the minimal standard that we will consider is a UK upper-second class Honours degree or its equivalent.
For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. The closing date for applications is June 30th 2015. All interested candidates should contact Dr Adam Barker in the first instance to discuss your eligibility for the scholarship and a proposal for research.
June 16th, seminar by Gavin Doherty: Technologies for mental health: designing for engagement
The School of Computer Science welcomes Dr Gavin Doherty, Trinity College Dublin to give his talk on ‘Technologies for mental health: designing for engagement’.
Abstract:
Mental illness is one of the greatest social and economic challenges facing our society.
The talk will consider at some of the different ways in which technology (and HCI research) can help, with a particular focus on the problem of engagement. Taking examples from a series of projects to develop novel technologies for use in the mental health space, we will see some of the unique issues and challenges which come from working in this domain, and the steps which can be taken to address them. The SilverCloud platform, designed to deliver range of engaging and effective clinician-supported mental health interventions, will be used as a specific example to discuss the topics of evaluation and dissemination. Development of a suite of programmes and a number of partnerships based on the platform have enabled the delivery of supported online interventions to tens of thousands of patients in a range of public and private healthcare services worldwide.
Bio:
Dr. Gavin Doherty is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, and co-founder of SilverCloud Health. He completed his doctorate at the University of York, before undertaking postdoctoral work at CNR in Pisa and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK before moving to TCD. He is interested in design for specific application areas, and has led a number of interdisciplinary projects in a number of different domains. A major focus of his work over the last decade has been on the design of technologies for mental health. The aim has been to develop systems which can increase access to, increase engagement with, and assist in improving the outcomes of mental health interventions.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.
Event details
- When: 16th June 2015 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
LitLong launches from AHRC funded project
The Palimpsest project involving the University of St Andrews’ SACHI group collaborating with the University of Edinburgh’s English literature and text-mining group launched LitLong Edinburgh on 30th march 2015.
Lit Long: Edinburgh features a range of maps and accessible visualisations, which enable users to interact with Edinburgh’s literature in a variety of ways, exploring the spatial relations of the literary city at particular times in its history, in the works of particular authors, or across different eras, genres and writers. Lit Long: Edinburgh makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the Edinburgh literary cityscape, with potential to shape the experience and understanding of critics and editors, residents and visitors, readers and writers.
Give the web visualisation a try here.
SACHI’s Dr Uta Hinrichs created the web visualisation, Dr David Harris-Birtill created the mobile app and Professor Aaron Quigley was the St Andrews lead and co-investigator on the Palimpsest project funded by the AHRC.
This work is featured on the Guardians website and mentioned in Edinburgh University’s news.
SICSA Seminar: “From rats to robot navigation and beyond” by Dr Michael Milford
The School of Computer Science welcomes Dr Michael Milford from Queensland University of Technology, Australia who is meantime visiting Scotland. 
Abstract: The brain circuitry involved in encoding space in rodents has been extensively tested over the past forty years, with an ever increasing body of knowledge about the components and wiring involved in navigation tasks. The learning and recall of spatial features is known to take place in and around the hippocampus of the rodent, where there is clear evidence of cells that encode the rodent’s position and heading. RatSLAM is a primarily vision-based robotic navigation system based on current models of the rodent hippocampus, which has achieved several significant outcomes in vision-based Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), including mapping of an entire suburb using only a low cost webcam, and navigation continuously over a period of two weeks in a delivery robot experiment. This research led to recent experiments demonstrating that impressive feats of vision-based navigation can be achieved at any time of day or night, during any weather, and in any season using visual images as small as 2 pixels in size. In our current research we are investigating the problem of place recognition and visual navigation from two angles. The first is from a neuroscience-inspired perspective, modelling the multi-scale neuronal map of space found in the mammalian brain and the variably tolerant and selective visual recognition process in the primate and human brain. The second is from an algorithmic perspective, utilizing state of the art deep learning techniques. I will discuss the insights from this research, as well as current and future areas of study with the aim of stimulating discussion and collaboration.
Bio: I hold a PhD in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Mechanical and Space Engineering from the University of Queensland (UQ), awarded in 2006 and 2002 respectively. After a brief postdoc in robotics at UQ, I worked for three years at the Queensland Brain Institute as a Research Fellow on the Thinking Systems Project. In 2010 I moved to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to finish off my Thinking Systems postdoc, and then was appointed as a Lecturer in 2011. In 2012 I was awarded an inaugural Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, which provides me with a research-intensive fellowship salary and extra funding support for 3 years. In 2013 I became a Microsoft Faculty Fellow and lived in Boston on sabbatical working with Harvard and Boston University. I am currently a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at QUT with a research focus, although I continue to teach Introduction to Robotics every year. From 2014 to 2020 I am a Chief Investigator on a $19,000,000 Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision.
My research interests include vision-based mapping and navigation, computational modelling of the rodent hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, especially with respect to mapping and navigation, computational modelling of human visual recognition, biologically inspired robot navigation and computer vision and Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM).
Homepage:https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy/Michael+Milford
Google Scholar:http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TDSmCKgAAAAJ
Event details
- When: 14th April 2015 14:30 - 17:00
- Where: Cole 1.33b
- Format: Seminar
Another Successful PhD Viva
Congratulations to To Masih Hajiarabderkani, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis. Pictured celebrating with supervisor Dr Graham Kirby and Internal examiner Dr John Thomson.
Type-driven Verification of Communicating Systems in Idris
Speaker: Edwin Brady
Abstract: Idris (http://idris-lang.org/) is a general-purpose programming language with an expressive type system which allows a programmer to state properties of a program precisely in its type. Type checking is equivalent to formally and mechanically checking a program’s correctness. Introductory examples of programs verified in this way typically involve length preserving operations on lists, or ordering invariants on sorting.
Realistically, though, programming is not so simple: programs interact with users, communicate over networks, manipulate state, deal with erroneous input, and so on. In this talk I will give an introduction to programming in Idris, with demonstrations, and show how its advanced type systems allows us to express such interactions precisely. I will show how it supports verification of stateful and communicating systems, in particular giving an example showing how to verify properties of concurrent communicating systems.
Bio: Edwin Brady is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research interests include programming language design, in particular type systems and domain specific languages. He leads the design and implementation of the Idris programming language, a general purpose functional programming language with dependent types, which he uses to implement verified domain specific languages. When he’s not doing that, he’s likely to be playing a game of Go, wrestling with the crossword, or stuck on a train somewhere.
Event details
- When: 7th April 2015 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Series: School Seminar Series
- Format: Seminar
April 13th, seminar by Nicolai Marquardt: Towards Ad-hoc Collaboration Spaces with Cross-Device Interaction Techniques
Speaker: Nicolai Marquardt, University College London
Date/Time: 1-2pm April 13, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews
Abstract:
Despite the ongoing proliferation of devices and form-factors such as tablets and electronic whiteboards, technology often hinders (rather than helps) informal small-group interactions. Whereas natural human conversation is fluid and dynamic, discussions that rely on digital content—slides, documents, clippings—often remain hindered due to the awkwardness of manipulating, sharing, and displaying information on and across multiple devices. Addressing these shortcomings, in this talk I present our research towards fluid, ad-hoc, minimally disruptive techniques for co-located collaboration by leveraging the proxemics of people as well as the proxemics of devices. In particular, I will demonstrate a number of cross-device interaction techniques—situated within the research theme of proxemic interactions—that support nuanced gradations of sharing. I will also introduce different novel hybrid sensing approaches enabling these interaction techniques and discuss future research directions.
Bio:
Nicolai Marquardt is Lecturer in Physical Computing at University College London. At the UCL Interaction Centre he is working in the research areas of ubiquitous computing, physical user interfaces, proxemic interactions, and interactive surfaces. He is co-author of the books Proxemic Interactions: From Theory to Practice (Morgan & Claypool 2015) and Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook (Elsevier, Morgan Kaufmann 2012).
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.
Following on from Nicolai Marquardt’s successful talk his slides can now be viewed here: St Andrews guest lecture Nicolai Marquardt – Slide Presentation
Event details
- When: 13th April 2015 13:00 - 14:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
New EPSRC project C3: Scalable & Verified Shared Memory
C3: Scalable & Verified Shared Memory via Consistency-directed Cache Coherence
Dr Susmit Sarkar
Susmit Sarkar with colleagues in the University of Edinburgh and Intel as project partners, have been successful in their application to the EPSRC for their project C3: Scalable & Verified Shared Memory via Consistency-directed Cache Coherence. This 3 year project starts in July 2015 and aims to realise scalable and verified shared memory.
Shared-memory multi-core processors are ubiquitous, but programming them remains challenging. The programming model exposed by such multi-core processors depends crucially on a “memory consistency model” (MCM), a contract between the hardware and the programmer, which essentially specifies what value a read can return. On the hardware side, one key mechanism to implement the memory consistency model is the “cache-coherence protocol” (CCP), which essentially communicates memory operations between processors. However, the connection between the CCP and the MCM remains unclear. This is especially true for modern CCPs and MCMs, in which CCP design has been divorced from the requirements of the MCM. Susmit and his colleagues argue that this has negatively impacted the scalability and the verifiability of CCPs.
On the scalability front, there are serious question marks about sustaining cache coherence as the number of cores continue to scale. On the verification front, the application of existing verification techniques, which do not verify the CCP against the MCM, are arguably broken.
The C3 proposal, proposes a family of CCPs that are “aware” of, and verified against the MCM. Their approach is motivated by the fact that both hardware and programming languages are converging to various relaxed MCMs for performance oriented reasons. The team use such relaxed MCMs as inspiration to research CCPs that can take advantage of them.
Specifically, they will research “lazy” CCPs where memory operations are batched, and the cost of communicating a memory operation can be amortised. They will also, for the first time, formally verify the relationship between the hardware CCPs and the programmer-oriented MCM they provide. They will investigate rigorously the gains to be had from such lazy CCPs. The team will do this by creating a multi-core silicon prototype of our proposed CCP, leveraging our experience in the design of industrial-strength micro-architectures and their implementations.